1 Protest and Social Movements in Political Science Kateřina Vráblíková 1 1 Introduction 2 Political science is next to sociology, which is a home discipline of social movement research, the second most important discipline that contributes to the study of collective action, social movements, protest, and contentious politics (Diani & Císař, 2014; Meyer & Lupo, 2010). For instance, 65 percent of the authors that published in the last two years in Mobilization: An International Quarterly (a major journal publishing social movement research) are affiliated to sociology; and 22 percent of authors have their primary affiliation to political science. How does political science study collective action, social movements, protest, and revolutions? There are several excellent reviews on the topic (Andretta, 2013; Císař, 2015; Meyer & Lupo, 2010). For instance, Císař (2015) embeds the most important works of social movement and political participation literature in traditions of classical political and social theorists like Marx, Weber, Polanyi or de Tocqueville. Meyer’s and Lupo’s (2010) chapter in the previous edition of this volume traces contributions that political scientists have made to research on protest and social movements since the 1950s. They argue that contentious politics is studied in political science to a greater extent than is usually assumed. Individual studies are, according to them, not connected to one paradigm or literature, as in sociology, and are more dispersed across various sub-disciplines of political science. The goal of this chapter is to map current research on social movements and protest in political science. Drawing on findings of Meyer and Lupo (2010) the focus is put on studies that do not necessarily fall under the field of research that is recognized as “social movement literature”, which is mostly developed in sociology, shares similar theoretical approaches (McAdam, Tarrow, & Tilly, 2001, p. 14) and is produced by a relatively interconnected network 1 The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA; vrablikova.1@osu.edu. 2 I am very thankful to Lorenzo Bosi, Ondřej Císař, María Inclán, Craig Jenkins, Joost de Moor, and to the editors of this volume Conny Roggeband and Bert Klandermans for their opinions and comments. I gratefully acknowledge funding from the Czech Grant Agency (Grant “Protestors in Context: An Integrated and Comparative Analysis of democratic Citizenship in the Czech Republic”, code GA13- 29032S).